The Lovers seems a deliberately misleading title for Vendela Vida's slim, reflective third novel: a 53-year-old American woman named Yvonne, whose husband was killed in a car accident two years earlier, returns to the seaside town in Turkey where she and her husband honeymooned almost three decades before. Her twin boy and girl are grown, and Yvonne, a history teacher in small-town Vermont, feels ready to begin shaking off her grief and rediscover the woman she used to be, and also to find something like the truth about her own life: she has travelled "to strip herself of these lies, to shed this grief. The grief and the lies were the same – one begot the other." She wants to stop feeling like a widow, to rediscover a self more engaged with the world around her. But Datça is seedier than she remembers, and nothing unfolds according to her nebulous plans and untested assumptions. An air of menace hovers in the prose from the novel's opening words, as Yvonne lands at the airport and fears she has made a terrible mistake: she found a vacation home online and rented it for a week, sending money in advance. The reader shares her fears that something will go very wrong, but the plot doesn't develop as she – or we – predicted. The villa's owner is honest, the house is clean and safe, but as she explores Yvonne finds discomfiting evidence of what one might call an active sex life: a book called The Woman's Guide to Anal Sex is sitting on the bookshelf, a sex swing is not quite packed away, while a photograph of a naked woman is found shoved under the sofa. The woman in the photo turns out not to be the owner's estranged wife, who shows up before long with tales of domestic abuse and infidelity.Yvonne is searching for something she can't identify, and spends much of the novel wandering aimlessly around the Turkish seaside. She visits the ancient town of Knidos, where she encounters Ahmet, a lonely 10-year-old boy who speaks no English. She befriends him, aware that she is trying to recapture her relationship with her own children, and rapidly comes to feel both protective and loyal, fearful of betraying his trust.This touching, unusual friendship is intercut with memories of Yvonne's children when they were young, especially her daughter, Aurelia, who spent many of her formative years in and out of rehab, placing a huge strain on Yvonne's marriage that she is only beginning to acknowledge. Their son, Matthew, was the "perfect" one, but Yvonne gradually admits that she found his perfection rebarbative, and in many ways feels closer to Aurelia, the damaged child.Yvonne makes some choices that one might find unusual in an intelligent, observant woman: her friendship with young Ahmet leads to misunderstanding and hostility, as a waiter at the beach makes clear, first with venomous glances and then with outright antagonism; Ahmet's grandmother is equally unwelcoming. There are some predictable complaints from locals about presumptuous Americans. Özlem, the landlord's estranged wife, is, by contrast, eager to befriend Yvonne in ways that may strain credulity. Lest the reader think these portents of trouble will go unfulfilled, Vida sends an owl, that omen of ill fate, into the house to terrorise Yvonne. Tragedy does indeed strike, but despite – or rather because of – all Vida's careful foreshadowings, it feels contrived, rather than inevitable.The virtues of this novel lie not in its plotting, which manages to be both slight and over-engineered, but in Vida's prose, which is full of sharply observed moments and poignant insights about the impossibilities – and possibilities – of human interaction. When Yvonne tells an American couple she encounters the story of her husband's accidental death, she remembers the gratuitous pain heaped on by an oblivious world: as she left her husband's memorial service, bewildered by grief, she found a note on the windshield telling her to be less "selfish" when she parked her car in future.Actions have consequences, to be sure, but overstating this can become a sort of a false syllogism: most mistakes end in neither tragedy nor epiphany. They are at once more negligible and more common – not to say persistent – than that. In the end The Lovers is a promissory note that isn't quite redeemed: not all of its implicit assurances are kept, and some narrative threads are left dangling, but it's also a darkly elegant book about broken promises and redemption that recognises our capacity for damage but allows for the prospect of deliverance.